The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (65 page)

I froze and then wheeled around with fists clenched but no one was near me. Six young men had descended the steps from the grandstand and were standing in a semicircle behind Mike. The man in front was tall, slim, and strikingly handsome. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old and his long blond curls spilled down on a crimson silk suit that emphasized his physique. In his right hand he carried a meter-long sword that looked to be of tempered steel.

Mike turned slowly. Even from a distance I could see his eyes sobering as he surveyed the situation. The women at his side and a
couple of the young men in his group tittered as if something humorous had been said. Mike allowed the inebriated grin to stay on his face. “You address me, sir?” he asked.

“I address you, you Hegemony whore’s son,” hissed the leader of the group. His handsome face was twisted into a sneer.

“Bertol,” whispered Siri. “My cousin. Gresham’s younger son.” I nodded and stepped out of the shadows. Siri caught my arm.

“That is twice you have referred unkindly to my mother, sir,” slurred Mike. “Have she or I offended you in some way? If so, a thousand pardons.” Mike bowed so deeply that the bells on his cap almost brushed the ground. Members of his group applauded.

“Your presence offends me, you Hegemony bastard. You stink up our air with your fat carcass.”

Mike’s eyebrows rose comically. A young man near him in a fish costume waved his hand. “Oh, come on, Bertol. He’s just …”

“Shut up, Ferick. It is this fat shithead I am speaking to.”

“Shithead?” repeated Mike, eyebrows still raised. “I’ve traveled two hundred light-years to be called a fat shithead? It hardly seems worth it.” He pivoted gracefully, untangling himself from the women as he did so. I would have joined Mike then but Siri clung tightly to my arm, whispering unheard entreaties. When I was free I saw that Mike was still smiling, still playing the fool. But his left hand was in his baggy shirt pocket.

“Give him your blade, Creg,” snapped Bertol. One of the younger men tossed a sword hilt-first to Mike. Mike watched it arc by and clang loudly on the cobblestones.

“You can’t be serious,” said Mike in a soft voice that was suddenly quite sober. “You cretinous cow turd. Do you really think I’m going to play duel with you just because you get a hard-on acting the hero for these yokels?”

“Pick up the sword,” screamed Bertol, “or, by God, I’ll carve you where you stand.” He took a quick step forward. The youth’s face contorted with fury as he advanced.

“Fuck off,” said Mike. In his left hand was the laser pen.

“No!” I yelled and ran into the light. That pen was used by construction workers to scrawl marks on girders of whiskered alloy.

Things happened very quickly then. Bertol took another step and
Mike flicked the green beam across him almost casually. The colonist let out a cry and leaped back; a smoking line of black was slashed diagonally across his silk shirtfront. I hesitated. Mike had the setting as low as it could go. Two of Bertol’s friends started forward and Mike swung the light across their shins. One dropped to his knees cursing and the other hopped away holding his leg and hooting.

A crowd had gathered. They laughed as Mike swept off his fool’s cap in another bow. “I thank you,” said Mike. “My mother thanks you.”

Siri’s cousin strained against his rage. Froths of spittle spilled on his lips and chin. I pushed through the crowd and stepped between Mike and the tall colonist.

“Hey, it’s all right,” I said. “We’re leaving. We’re going now.”

“Goddamn it, Merin, get out of the way,” said Mike.

“It’s all right,” I said as I turned to him. “I’m with a giri named Siri who has a …” Bertol stepped forward and lunged past me with his blade. I wrapped my left arm around his shoulder and flung him back. He tumbled heavily onto the grass.

“Oh, shit,” said Mike as he backed up several paces. He looked tired and a little disgusted as he sat down on a stone step. “Aw,
damn,”
he said softly. There was a short line of crimson in one of the black patches on the left side of his Harlequin costume. As I watched, the narrow slit spilled over and blood ran down across Mike Osho’s broad belly.

“Oh, Jesus, Mike.” I tore a strip of fabric from my shirt and tried to staunch the flow. I could remember none of the first aid we’d been taught as midShipmen. I pawed at my wrist but my comlog was not there. We had left them on the
Los Angeles
.

“It’s not so bad, Mike,” I gasped. “It’s just a little cut.” The blood flowed down over my hand and wrist.

“It will serve,” said Mike. His voice was held taut by a cord of pain. “Damn. A fucking sword. Do you believe it, Merin? Cut down in the prime of my prime by a piece of fucking cutlery out of a fucking one-penny opera. Oh,
damn
, that smarts.”

“Three-penny opera,” I said and changed hands. The rag was soaked.

“You know what your fucking problem is, Merin? You’re always sticking your fucking two cents in. Awwwww.” Mike’s face went white and then gray. He lowered his chin to his chest and breathed deeply. “To
hell
with this, kid. Let’s go home, huh?”

I looked over my shoulder. Bertol was slowly moving away with his friends. The rest of the crowd milled around in shock. “Call a doctor!” I screamed. “Get some medics up here!” Two men ran down the street. There was no sign of Siri.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” said Mike in a stronger voice as if he had forgotten something important. “Just a minute,” he said and died.

Died. A real death. Brain death. His mouth opened obscenely, his eyes rolled back so only the whites showed, and a minute later the blood ceased pumping from the wound.

For a few mad seconds I cursed the sky. I could see the L.A. moving across the fading starfield and I knew that I could bring Mike back if I could get him there in a few minutes. The crowd backed away as I screamed and ranted at the stars.

Eventually I turned to Bertol. “You,” I said.

The young man had stopped at the far end of the Common. His face was ashen. He stared wordlessly.

“You,” I said again. I picked up the laser pen from where it had rolled, clicked the power to maximum, and walked to where Bertol and his friends stood waiting.

Later, through the haze of screams and scorched flesh, I was dimly aware of Siri’s skimmer setting down in the crowded square, of dust flying up all around, and of her voice commanding me to join her. We lifted away from the light and madness. The cool wind blew my sweat-soaked hair away from my neck.

“We will go to Fevarone,” said Siri. “Bertol was drunk. The Separatists are a small, violent group. There will be no reprisals. You will stay with me until the Council holds the inquest.”

“No,” I said. “There. Land there.” I pointed to a spit of land not far from the city.

Siri landed despite her protests. I glanced at the boulder to make sure the backpack was still there and then climbed out of the skimmer. Siri slid across the seat and pulled my head down to hers.
“Merin, my love.” Her lips were warm and open but I felt nothing. My body felt anesthetized. I stepped back and waved her away. She brushed her hair back and stared at me from green eyes filled with tears. Then the skimmer lifted, turned, and sped to the south in the early morning light.

Just a minute
, I felt like calling. I sat on a rock and gripped my knees as several ragged sobs were torn up out of me. Then I stood and threw the laser pen into the surf below. I tugged out the backpack and dumped the contents on the ground.

The hawking mat was gone.

I sat back down, too drained to laugh or cry or walk away. The sun rose as I sat there. I was still sitting there three hours later when the large black skimmer from ShipSecurity set down silently beside me.

   “Father? Father, it is getting late.”

I turn to see my son Donel standing behind me. He is wearing the blue and gold robe of the Hegemony Council. His bald scalp is flushed and beaded with sweat. Donel is only forty-three but he seems much older to me.

“Please, Father,” he says. I nod and rise, brushing off the grass and dirt. We walk together to the front of the tomb. The crowd has pressed closer now. Gravel crunches under their feet as they shift restlessly. “Shall I enter with you, Father?” Donel asks.

I pause to look at this aging stranger who is my child. There is little of Siri or me reflected in him. His face is friendly, florid, and tense with the excitement of the day. I can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the place of intelligence in some people. I cannot help but compare this balding puppy of a man to Alón—Alón of the dark curls and silences and sardonic smile. But Alón is thirty-three years dead, cut down in a stupid battle which had nothing to do with him.

“No,” I say. “I’ll go in by myself. Thank you, Donel.”

He nods and steps back. The pennants snap above the heads of the straining crowd. I turn my attention to the tomb.

The entrance is sealed with a palmlock. I have only to touch it.

During the past few minutes I have developed a fantasy which will save me from both the growing sadness within and the external series of events which I have initiated. Siri is not dead. In the last stages of her illness she had called together the doctors and the few technicians left in the colony and they rebuilt for her one of the ancient hibernation chambers used in their seedship two centuries earlier. Siri is only sleeping. What is more, the year-long sleep has somehow restored her youth. When I wake her she will be the Siri I remember from our early days. We will walk out into the sunlight together and when the farcaster doors open we shall be the first through.

“Father?”

“Yes.” I step forward and set my hand to the door of the crypt. There is a whisper of electric motors and the white slab of stone slides back. I bow my head and enter Siri’s tomb.

   “Damn it, Merin, secure that line before it knocks you overboard. Hurry!” I hurried. The wet rope was hard to coil, harder to tie off. Siri shook her head in disgust and leaned over to tie a bowline knot with one hand.

It was our Sixth Reunion. I had been three months too late for her birthday but more than five thousand other people had made it to the celebration. The CEO of the All Thing had wished her well in a forty-minute speech. A poet read his most recent verses to the Love Cycle sonnets. The Hegemony Ambassador had presented her with a scroll and a new ship, a small submersible powered by the first fusion cells to be allowed on Maui-Covenant.

Siri had eighteen other ships. Twelve belonged to her fleet of swift catamarans that plied their trade between the wandering Archipelago and the home islands. Two were beautiful racing yachts that were used only twice a year to win the Founder’s Regatta and the Covenant Criterium. The other four craft were ancient fishing boats, homely and awkward, well maintained but little more than scows.

Siri had nineteen ships but we were on a fishing boat—the
Ginnie Paul
. For the past eight days we had fished the shelf of the Equatorial
Shallows; a crew of two, casting and pulling nets, wading knee-deep through stinking fish and crunching trilobites, wallowing over every wave, casting and pulling nets, keeping watch, and sleeping like exhausted children during our brief rest periods. I was not quite twenty-three. I thought I was used to heavy labor aboard the
L.A.
and it was my custom to put in an hour of exercise in the 1.3-g pod every second shift, but now my arms and back ached from the strain and my hands were blistered between the calluses. Siri had just turned seventy.

“Merin, go forward and reef the foresail. Do the same for the jib and then go below to see to the sandwiches. Plenty of mustard.”

I nodded and went forward. For a day and a half we had been playing hide-and-seek with a storm: sailing before it when we could, turning about and accepting its punishment when we had to. At first it had been exciting, a welcome respite from the endless casting and pulling and mending. But after the first few hours the adrenaline rush faded to be replaced by constant nausea, fatigue, and a terrible tiredness. The seas did not relent. The waves grew to six meters and higher. The
Ginnte Paul
wallowed like the broad-beamed matron she was. Everything was wet. My skin was soaked under three layers of rain gear. For Siri it was a long-awaited vacation.

“This is nothing,” she had said during the darkest hour of the night as waves washed over the deck and smashed against the scarred plastic of the cockpit. “You should see it during simoon season.”

The clouds still hung low and blended into gray waves in the distance but the sea was down to a gentle five-foot chop. I spread mustard across the roast beef sandwiches and poured steaming coffee into thick white mugs. It would have been easier to transport the coffee in zero-g without spilling it than to get up the pitching shaft of the companionway. Siri accepted her depleted cup without commenting. We sat in silence for a bit, appreciating the food and the tongue-scalding warmth. I took the wheel when Siri went below to refill our mugs. The gray day was dimming almost imperceptibly into night.

“Merin,” she said after handing me my mug and taking a seat on the long cushioned bench which encircled the cockpit, “what will happen after they open the farcaster?”

I was surprised by the question. We had almost never talked about the time when Maui-Covenant would join the Hegemony. I glanced over at Siri and was struck by how ancient she suddenly seemed. Her face was a mosaic of seams and shadows. Her beautiful green eyes had sunken into wells of darkness and her cheekbones were knife edges against brittle parchment. She kept her gray hair cut short now and it stuck out in damp spikes. Her neck and wrists were tendoned cords emerging from a shapeless sweater.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What will happen after they open the farcaster?”

“You know what the Council says, Siri.” I spoke loudly because she was hard of hearing in one ear. “It will open a new era of trade and technology for Maui-Covenant. And you won’t be restricted to one little world any longer. When you become citizens, everyone will be entitled to use the farcaster doors.”